Weekly trading review: a simple routine

A daily note tells you how the day felt. A week tells you what's actually going on. Five days is enough to see a pattern but short enough to remember why you took each trade. That's what makes the weekly review the most useful half hour in a trading week. It's also the one most of us skip.

Here's the routine I use. Five steps, same order every time.

When to do it

Pick a fixed slot. Friday after the close or Saturday morning both work. Not straight after a losing day while you're still annoyed. And not on Sunday night, when you should be planning instead of judging.

Thirty minutes is plenty. If it takes two hours, you'll stop doing it.

Step 1: get the numbers

Just four numbers, all in R:

• Total R for the week.
• Number of trades.
• Biggest single loss.
• Days inside your daily loss limit, out of the days you traded.

R keeps the week honest. A big lot on one trade can make the money look better or worse than the decisions were. (If R is new to you, start with R multiple: how to measure trades in R.)

Step 2: plan against what happened

Open last week's plan next to the trades. Go through them one by one and mark each trade: in the plan or not. Setup on your list? Risk as planned? Stop where it should be?

This step does most of the work. You're not asking whether the trade won. You're asking whether it was a trade you meant to take.

Step 3: where the R came from

Group the week by setup and by session. Which setup made the R? Which one lost it? Did the losses come in the first hour or late in the day?

One warning. A week is far too small a sample to judge a setup. Three trades on a setup tell you nothing about the setup. They might tell you something about you. Note it and look again when you have a few dozen.

Step 4: read your notes

Read the daily takeaways in a row. Look for the same word twice. "Rushed." "Bored." "After two losses." The things you wrote when it was fresh are worth more than anything you remember on Friday.

Step 5: one change

Pick one thing for next week. One. Write it into next week's plan as a rule you can check: "No third trade after two losses in a day." Not "be more disciplined".

Next Friday the first question is simple. Did you keep it?

Example: one week, nine trades

• Plan: up to 10 trades, max loss 4R for the week, daily loss limit 2R.
• Monday: +1.2, -1. Day: +0.2R.
• Tuesday: -1, -1, -0.4. Day: -2.4R. The third trade came after two losses and broke the daily limit.
• Wednesday: +2.1. Day: +2.1R.
• Thursday: -1, +0.8. Day: -0.2R.
• Friday: -1. A setup that wasn't in the plan.
• Week: 9 trades, -1.3R. Daily limit kept on 4 of 5 days. Biggest single loss 1R.
• The 7 trades in the plan made +0.1R. The 2 outside it lost 1.4R.
• Result: the losing week came from two trades outside the plan. Next week's change: no third trade after two losses in a day.

Look at what the money alone would have said: a red week, so maybe the strategy's broken. The review says something else. The planned trades roughly broke even. The loss came from two decisions that weren't part of the plan. That's a much easier thing to fix.

Mistakes that make the review useless

Changing the strategy after one week. Nine trades don't prove anything about a method. Change your behaviour weekly if you need to. Change the method only on a much bigger sample.

Reviewing only red weeks. A green week with five trades outside the plan is a warning, not a win. Review every week the same way.

Making a list of ten fixes. You'll keep none. One change, checked next Friday.

Doing it from memory. If you didn't write anything during the week, the review turns into a story you tell yourself. The daily notes are what make it work. (See How to keep a trading journal.)

Common questions

Tomky, Dojiwave · Updated 14 November 2026